Load shedding gives more reasons to move to the cloud

"Wise business owners should be planning for unreliable electricity supply as the new normal," said Jardim. "It's not just load shedding - even without the current strain on Eskom's generating capacity, ageing distribution infrastructure will continue to cause local outages, which are often unplanned. We all need to be operating as if the lights could go off at any moment."

There are three things SMMEs in particular can do to prepare for energy disruption, he said. "Firstly, they need to move their businesses into the cloud; secondly, they need to outsource as much of their infrastructure as possible; and, thirdly, they need to develop a mobile workforce strategy."

"The time is perfect for a cloud strategy even without the new incentive of maintaining business continuity through load shedding," said Jardim. "Moving into the cloud can lower monthly costs, increase productivity, enable always-on availability and actually increase security and stability. For most businesses the most critical applications are email, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting - and there are already excellent, well-tested and widely used cloud options available for all of those."

An initial learning curve

"Moving systems into the cloud may involve an initial learning curve," said Jardim, "but one of the key success factors is not to go it alone. That's why the second step is to find a skilled, experienced partner for your cloud migration that can seamlessly take over your ICT requirements and manage your infrastructure. Very few small businesses need to invest in their own generators and UPS to keep their servers running, for example - that should all be your partner's problem. A specialist cloud service provider can take advantage of economies of scale to provide high-quality, uninterrupted service, with complete and reliable back-ups of all your data, without you ever having to touch a server or storage device."

"Finally," said Jardim, "you need to develop a mobile workforce strategy. Nowadays there are very few people who genuinely need to be bound to their office desk and phone - with a laptop or tablet and mobile data they can work anywhere. That means your business needn't grind to a halt just because the lights go out - work can continue from home, satellite offices or even coffee shops as long as there's connectivity. Your partner should also help you develop a communications strategy that provides seamless connectivity for all your key business applications, no matter where or when they're needed."

"Every crisis conceals an opportunity and this is no exception," concluded Jardim. "Load shedding may be the final factor that pushes some SMMEs into the cloud, but they'll discover many other benefits once they get there."